Folding Pages for Your Paper Chain
by litvirg
Summary: Fill for Prompt: AU where they're both in a hospital recovering from various injuries (imagine Bellamy in a wheelchair though) and they get moved to rooms next to each other and it makes each of them feel just a bit lighter.


All things considered, the hospital wasn't a totally horrible place to be.

(Well, except for the guy in the room next to her who kept banging up against the wall. She was definitely going to have to get someone to talk to him about that. Or her, she realized. It could be a her. She would have no way of knowing).

"You totally could find out," her friend Raven told her when she tried to explain the situation. Clarke merely rolled her eyes at the phone and sighed. "I heard that, Griffin. Just get off your ass and tell him to knock it off."

"Yeah okay," Clarke teased back. "Super easy to just jump on up out of bed with all these tubes sticking into various parts of my body."

And there were tubes everywhere. In her nose. Her arms. Places she didn't want to talk about. It really wasn't as simple as Raven seemed to think it was.

"Clarke…"

"No, Raven, I'm fine."

Clarke didn't want to get into it. She didn't even know how. And Raven got it. Mostly. But it was different being in a hospital than it was to have a best friend in the hospital. And it was different to have cancer than to know someone who has cancer.

"Anyway, I should go, my mom is probably going to visit soon," Clarke said.

"Okay," Raven said. "I'll talk to you soon though, alright?"

"Yeah, you got it," Clarke said distractedly.

Clicking the phone off, she tipped her head back and started counting the tiles on the ceiling. Again.

She hated that the jokes were right about the food. There was only so much pudding she could eat. (And there was a very, very limited amount of Jell-O that she could tolerate).

She hated how it actually bothered her.

The nurses were nice though.

And there was this one intern, Monty, who made a point to sneak her candy bars whenever he was working.

(He didn't really have to sneak them, he knew it, she knew it, but he'd give her the goofiest smile whenever he'd slide them out from under his sleeve and she'd forget about the awkward feeling of the tube in her nose as she laughed and took it, so they pretended it was a secret).

So the people. They were good.

The banging on the wall was still annoying though. And the food still sucked.

It was a few days before she did anything about the banging on the wall.

Well, she didn't so much "do something" as pound her own fist into the wall and yell "You mind?" as loud (and as angrily) as she could.

It was not well received. The following thud had much more force than any of the other before and she heard a muffled "Fuck off, Princess" through the wall.

She slouched back down into her bed. Whatever.

"Asshole," she muttered.

"What the hell is wrong with that guy?" she asked Monty a few days later.

He looked up from the magazine he was looking through, his eyebrows squished together. "I'm, uh," he started. "I'm not really allowed to talk about the patients to other patients. Or, anyone except their doctors really."

"Plus you don't actually know anything," she teased, voice raising over the loud thumping in the background.

"Hey!" he protested. "I know plenty. I just can't tell you any of it."

"Fine," she huffed. "Can you at least try to get him to stop?"

Monty looked over at her, confused. "Stop what?"

She threw a Snickers at him.

"You didn't have to sic the intern on me."

Clarke rubbed her eyes and pushed herself up from, propping herself up on her elbows. The voice came from her doorway. She glanced over.

A man sat there in her doorway, in a wheelchair, in sweats and a t-shirt, an angry, petulant look on his face partially covered by a mop of dark hair falling over his forehead.

"What?" Her voice was groggy.

"Monty," he said flatly. "The intern. Didn't think that guy could get mad, but he's actually kind of scary when he is."

She still wasn't following.

"What?"

He rolled his eyes and then wheeled himself closer to her bed. "Look, I'm sorry about the banging on the walls. I'll stop."

Oh. So Monty had talked to him.

"Uh, thanks I guess." She wondered why he was in a wheel chair, and why he'd been banging on the wall in the first place. She wondered what Monty could have possibly said to intimidate the man sitting before her, who was probably twice Monty's size, and what made him decide to actually come over and apologize to her. Instead she said, "I'm Clarke. By the way."

"Bellamy," he grunted.

"Nice to meet—"

"Yeah okay." And he was pushing himself out of her room.

Charmer.

He came back the next day with an extra serving of pudding.

"I swear to god, if I see one more bowl of pudding, I'm jumping out the window," Clarke said.

Bellamy just raised an eyebrow at her. "Relax, Princess. It's for me. I got one of the nurses to sneak me an extra serving." He picked up one of the bowls and started shoveling food into his mouth. "Not all of us are expecting five star cuisine," he muttered through spoonfuls of pudding.

"I'm not—why did you even come in here?"

He looked up at her, a dab of pudding stuck to the outer corner of his lip. His forehead was pinched and he actually looked embarrassed, if the slight flush on his neck was anything to go by.

"I don't know," he spat out. "Nice to not eat alone, I guess."

He went back to eating before Clarke had a chance to answer, so she pulled one of Monty's candy bars out from under her pillow and started to unwrap it.

"Care to share?" he smirked at her.

"I'm sure one of your nurses could get you one," she said, and then she shoved half of it in her mouth at once.

It became routine. Bellamy would wheel himself into her room, double servings of whatever he'd wheedled out of his nurse that day, and she'd sit in her bed and stuff her face with candy bars.

It was nice. Comforting. He'd been right, when he told her it was nice to not eat alone.

They didn't talk much; once he started lingering longer than it took for him to eat, he'd begun bringing a book with him to sit and read by her bed while she sat and sketched. It was a quiet sort of security, but it was what they had, and Clarke was okay with it.

One day, he snapped his book shut, but stayed where he was.

"It was a car accident," he said suddenly. Her head popped up from where she had been sketching a pair of hands. (His pair of hands, actually. Not that she would tell him that).

"What?"

He tapped his palm on the arm of his wheelchair.

"A car accident. That did this."

"Oh," she said softly. There wasn't much she really could say (not that he was expecting her to say much. But more than one syllable might have been nice).

"It was late and I was tired. I didn't swerve out of the way in time. Drunk driver smashed right into my door."

"Bellamy—"

He tucked his book into his lap and started wheeling toward the door. "I don't want your pity or anything. There's nothing you can do." He was at the doorway. "I just wanted to tell you."

She wasn't sure if he would come back the next day, but he did. He dropped a Milky Way onto her lap as he rolled by.

"Sorry," he said. "About leaving yesterday. I'm just kind of used to people being assholes about the accident. Like saying they're sorry is actually going to make me be able to walk again."

It broke her heart to see that despite his words, he still had the tiniest flicker of hope in his eyes. He wanted a miracle. He wanted to wake up in the morning and be able to wiggle his toes, and stretch his legs. To be able to stroll into her room with an obscene amount of Jell-O instead of pushing the wheels of his chair over to her bed.

"You're not going to walk again, Bellamy. You know that."

"Yeah," he sighed, rubbing a hand over his forehead. "I know."

He figured out it was his hands that she was drawing.

It was kind of obvious, because the fingers on the page were wrapped around the same book he brought into her room every day. It was really just a matter of time.

"This is me?" he asked, snatching the sketchbook off her lap. His eyes were wide as he stared down at the drawing, his fingers ran along the edge of the page.

"Well, I mean, just your hands, really, but yeah," she stuttered out.

He nodded as he stared. When he was finally finished looking at it, he raised his eyes from the page to meet hers.

"Can I keep it?" he asked.

She ripped the page out of the book and handed it over. It wasn't even her best work, she was a little embarrassed to give it to him. But he smiled for the first time in days as she passed it over to him, so she decided, really, it couldn't have been too bad.

They started playing a game, after they would eat.

He still brought his book over with him, but he asked her one day of she was up for a challenge. She'd nodded, so he'd dragged her sketchbook off the small table next to her bed, flipped to an open page and plopped it in her lap.

"Listen," he'd instructed. Then he flipped to a page in his book and started reading out loud. It was a description of a river, in the middle of the woods. It led to a spring, surrounded by mossy rocks and great, tall trees.

"Okay," he said when he'd finished reading. "Draw."

It was sloppy, and rushed. She didn't want to make him wait too long, he was rolling himself forwards and backwards as he waiting for her to finish up, but she wanted it to be good enough to show him. When she finished, she flipped the book around to show him what she came up with and the corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile.

"Nicely done, Griffin," he said. "I'll have to find something harder for tomorrow."

They'd been at their game for a few days when Clarke got worse. She couldn't eat anything, she just kept throwing it up.

It happened once when Bellamy was in her room. He was reading to her, his voice low and smooth like honey, washing over her when she felt it coming on. She'd only eaten a little bit that day, forgoing her usual candy bars for a small handful of crackers.

His eyes had widened when she doubled over, spitting up the contents of her stomach, and then some, coloring her sheets a disgusting brown.

He'd stopped mid-sentence as soon as she'd gagged, and he reached toward her, to rub her back or something, she didn't know, but she jerked away and covered her face with her hands. She was humiliated.

"Clarke—" he started and she could hear it. She could hear the horror in his voice and she couldn't do it anymore, she couldn't pretend.

"Just go," she whispered. She felt his hand reach for her arm again but she shrugged it off, not taking her hands away from her face. "I said go."

He didn't come back the next day.

She wished she'd been more surprised at that.

She started eating lunch with Monty again.

She recognized his shadow at the door. It had been a few days, but she knew it was him.

He wheeled himself over to her bedside, tray of food absent from his lap. He still had a book though. It was a new one.

"What stage are you?" he asked. She didn't look up.

"Come on, Clarke," he begged. "I didn't ask you before because I figured it was your thing to tell me. I figured you would eventually tell me. But you haven't so I'm asking, please I need to know—"

"Why?"

His face darkened as his brows knit together. His mouth opened once but nothing came out. He shut it and swallowed, taking a moment to gather himself before trying again. His jaw was set at a hard angle.

"I just don't want to get too attached to someone with an expiration date," he bit out.

She ignored the burning in her chest and the fire in his eyes. She tore her gaze away. "Well," she started. "Then I'd stop wasting your time."

When she looked back up at him, the fire had gone out. His eyes were wide and flat, his lips were pressed together, not in anger, but in something she couldn't quite place.

"Clarke—" he reached out for her hand. She yanked it away.

"Get out."

She watched a tear drop from his face but he pushed himself back, away from her. She heard a muttered "Fuck you, Clarke," as he shook his head and wheeled himself out of her room.

She tipped her head back and started to count the tiles on the ceiling.

She went back to eating pudding.

It tasted horrible.

It was late when she woke up choking. Her food from earlier was stuck in her throat and she couldn't breathe. She felt her body rack itself over to try and get it out, get some room for air, but she couldn't reach her call button.

She reached her arm out behind her and pounded on the wall.

It seemed like her body had been folded in on itself for hours when she heard a muffled _"Clarke!"_ and she realized that out of all the words he'd ever said to her, he'd said he name the most.

She waited to hear it again, but everything went black.

She woke up in her bed, and wondered if it had all been a dream. She heard a shuffling to her right and she opened her eyes. It was all fuzzy for a moment, but she saw the outline of a figure leaning onto her bed. It was moving, waking up as she did and all she could see as her world came into focus was a mop of dark hair over bloodshot eyes.

"Hey, Bell," she croaked.

His hand was rubbing her arm. She didn't even think he knew that he was doing it, his mind seemed detached from his body, but it felt good, felt warm, so she closed her eyes a bit and smiled at his touch.

"Clarke." His voice was raw. "Oh, god, Clarke." She brought her hand up to his cheek and wiped away the tears he didn't want to let fall. "I can't believe what I said, it's not true at all, I didn't want—"

She pulled him into her, and brushed her lips softly against his, once.

"There's no point in trying not to get attached," he said when she pulled away. His eyes were shut and he was holding her face against his. "It's too late for me."

"Yeah," she said. "Me too."


End file.
